Dental Marketing Strategies

Opening a dental clinic does not guarantee inflow of patients. In every few days a new dental practice opens up, eating in your share of patients. For attracting new patients to your dental practice, you need effective Dental Marketing Strategies. It need not be a huge investment. There are many ways you can market your dental practice for free or with minimal investment. Here are few of them:

1) High – Quality Dental Website

Having a website does not guarantee conversion of its visitors into patients of your dental clinic. The website should be professional, easily navigational and attractive to its visitors. The most important job of a website is to create a positive image of your dental practice. Compel patients to take an action like signing up for a newsletter or booking an appointment. Having a high conversion rate of your website can increase the number of patients visiting your clinic.

2) Dental SEO

It is done to make your website rank high in the google search. Search engine optimization can be done both for local and international searches.

Local SEO

The results which show up when users search on their mobile for nearest dental clinics are part of local SEO. For an effective local SEO, your dental clinic name should be listed in all local listings of your area. It is the best way to target patients in and around your locality

International SEO

It is done to target the global audience. With a boom in medical and dental tourism, there is an influx of foreign patients in India and other Asian countries. With promising growth in upcoming years, international SEO done right can target patients who are willing to travel for their treatment. These patients provide not only the monetary growth of your practice but also gives global exposure.

3) Social Media Marketing

Every social media like Facebook, twitter, Instagram provide paid marketing. You can start marketing with a minimal budget in all these platforms. In favor of paid marketing, organic reach of social media posts is reduced. It doesn’t matter how many likes you have on your social media pages. You can target a large number of audience, streamline your marketing to target patients in specific age groups, gender and locality. With every person being on social media, they are the go-to platforms for your dental clinic advertising. Apart from advertising, you can stay in touch with your old patients and do brand marketing for your dental clinic.

It is a highly converting advertising campaign. The people who see these ads are already searching for them. They are interested in getting the specific treatment that is advertised in the ad. Hence converting them to your paying patients is not difficult. The most popular website for PPC is Google. You must have noticed that whenever you search for any service in google, top 2-3 results are ads from various service centres. The best part of these ads is that you pay only if people click on your ad. It creates brand awareness even to those people who don’t click on your ad without any further cost.

Email marketing provides information about your dental clinic right in the inbox of your potential patients. It is a personal communication tool between the patient and the dentist. Create a newsletter for your dental clinic website and ask the email ids to your website visitors. You can collect email ids from the patients who come for a consultation at your clinic. Sending regular and useful emails to your patients create a brand awareness battling the oldest adage, “out of sight and out of mind.”

Don’t irritate them by sending a daily mail. Email marketing should be done in a proper way. Send an email only once or twice a month with useful content. Don’t just ask them to come to your clinic, show them why they should by sharing dental hygiene tips, new treatments available, any discounts you are providing etc. If done properly, email marketing is one of the best tools by which you can attract new patients to your dental practice.

6) Effective Patient Management

Advertising can get a patient to your dental practice, but retaining them remains up to you and your staff. Treat the patient with respect and kindness. Clear all the doubts they may have with patience. The patient doesn’t know the intricacies of a dental treatment, they only know you, so the responsibility to build their trust lies with you.

Train your staff to be polite with them. Collect the name, mail ids and phone nos of patients visiting your dental clinic. Keep in touch with them over months and years by sending a regular email or wishing them on festivals. Make a reminder call of their scheduled appointment. Ask for reviews on google and Facebook. It creates social proof of your dental practice. Most patients will oblige if requested.

7) Patient Referrals

The word of mouth publicity is the best publicity you can get for your dental practice. Ask your current patients to refer you to their relatives and acquaintances. If you provide a good service, they are most likely to send their loved ones to you. You can also offer referral discounts to encourage people to send new patients to your dental practice.

8) Local Listings

Enlist your dental clinic website with complete address of your dental clinic and phone no’s to all local listings available in your area like sulekha. It increases your chances of getting new patients as these listings usually rank on the first page of google search. These listings are organized area wise, so the person who finds your dental practice in it will be a local resident residing nearby your dental practice. It increases the awareness of your dental practice by word of mouth too.

9) Networking

Networking is a major contributor to create your brand awareness and value. The more visible you are; the more value is attached to your name. Networking can lead you to many opportunities which otherwise would be lost if you are not connected with the right people. It is imperative that you network both with prospective patients and fellow dentists.

With Prospective Patients

Participate in your local community events, create awareness of dental problems and their solutions by conducting awareness programs in schools and offices. They not only provide you with prospective patients but also create brand awareness of your dental clinic. It need not be expensive, you only need a banner depicting your dental clinic name and dentists who can give free consultation at the venue.

With Dentists

Every dentist has a speciality in a particular treatment. You can exchange patients of your specialties. Send referrals to other dental clinics who need specialized treatment available there and ask for the same regarding your speciality. It can be a win-win situation for both of you in the matter of revenue and patient growth.

10) Marketing Campaign

Create a strategic, goal specific, actionable marketing campaign for your dental practice or get help from a professional marketing company like Techie Dentist, which can create both online and offline marketing campaigns for you and run them effectively. In this age of cut-throat competition and advertising gimmicks, marketing your dental practice is as necessary as providing quality treatment.

Don’t apply all Dental Marketing strategies at once, select a combination and concentrate on making it work. If you do everything at once, then it will be like scattered efforts and you will fail to make growth in any area. For Digital Marketing Strategies for Dentist to work, you need a base, that is your dental website. It is your home on the web, you need to make it beautiful before you start attracting guests to it. Hope to see growth in your dental practice with any of the above marketing strategies.